Thursday, March 01, 2007

a full-scale congressional hearing

"So yes, the trial of Scooter Libby has raised as many questions as it has answered, but we need not wait for the President and Vice President to answer them; nor should we wait for the outcome of any further criminal investigation. What is needed is a full-scale congressional hearing by the House Oversight Committee on Government Reform. Representative Henry Waxman (D. Ca.), the chair of the committee, has subpoena power and can subpoena telephone records, meeting notes, daily calendars, memos, and a host of key players whose testimony was not legally relevant in the Libby trial, but who obviously have intimate knowledge of the entire CIA leak case and cover-up. These figures would include Karl Rove, Richard Armitage, lobbyist Ken Duberstein, Colin Powell and Stephen Hadley among others. Finally, unlike the prosecutor in a grand jury investigation, Waxman can hold hearings that are public - in Room 2154 Rayburn Office Building, Washington, D.C. So the misconduct of these public men and women, our highest elected and appointed officials in the Executive Branch, can finally be judged by a much larger jury of their peers, the people of the United States."

"I thought a very fast (Libby) verdict would mean an acquittal, indicating the jury just didn't buy the Government's theory. Anything past that shows a serious deliberation of all of the evidence, which includes 8 hours of Libby grand jury testimony as well as a review of all of the trial testimony and exhibits, the jury instructions and verdict forms, and their application to the five separate charges against Libby.[]I have learned you can never predict how a jury will decide a case. If deliberations go into next week, I think a fair reading is that at least one juror has a differing view from that of other jurors. But again, that doesn't signal anything about which view, guilty or not guilty, is prevailing. Also, there may be unanimity on some counts but not others."